PSYCH 3F03 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-4: Evolutionary Medicine, Human Behavioral Ecology, Evolutionary Anthropology
Document Summary
Evolutionary psychology is defined as evolutionarily informed study of human mental processes: inappropriate title for describtion should be called human evolutionary psychology (hep) Include work by evolutionary anthropologists, human sociobiologists and human behavioural ecologists. Evolutionary psychology is as old as darwinism. Most researchers in hep are adaptationists: mental process exist for an adaptive reason and do something to further reproductive fitness, shown through the characterization of mental processes by there function in research papers/ideas. Conflict over the degree to which cognitive processes are domain specific. Agreed that human cognition comprisises multiple information-processing capabilities that are execute by a multiplicity of mental algorithms with adaptive function. Mainstream social psychology has gone in circles as a result of proposed intrapsychic functions that are not congruent with demands of outside world. Hep believe that the testing of adaptationist hypotheses should be done with attention to how adaptations evolve in order to rescue functional theorizing.